The Time in Korea

No sooner had the President announced his support of Korea than a Dallas citizen was on the telephone, calling his local newspaper. Where was Korea, anyway? Were the people Indians or Japanese? And what time was it there?

It was a rare U.S. citizen who could pass a detailed quiz on the little piece of Asiatic peninsula he had just guaranteed with troops, planes and ships. But that didn't seem to matter. Across the nation there was solid popular agreement that Harry Truman had acted wisely and swiftly. "I'll tell ya," said Evar Malin, 37, who farms his mother's 140 acres north of Sycamore, Ill., "I think we done the right thing. We had to take some kind of action against the Russians; maybe been a good idea if we'd stepped in a little sooner." The usually unswervable Republicans of Warren County, Iowa swerved long enough to resolve: "We don't know who told [the President] to do it, but for once he made a right decision."

An 83-year-old man in Los Angeles, a Boston newspaper columnist, and a Phoenix housewife had a simultaneous urge to call up Joe Stalin and ask what he was up to. The Premier wasn't taking calls, said the Kremlin operator, but perhaps when he wasn't so busy he would call back.

The people remembered, and were reminded of Pearl Harbor--but this wasn't the same; the shock wasn't so great, and in nine years everybody had learned something about taking crisis news in stride. Rather than feeling alarm at the risks, many seemed to be grateful for the end of an era of uncertainty. The Christian Science Monitor's Washington bureau chief, Joseph C. Harsch, a resident of the capital for 20 years, reported: "Never before in that time have I felt such a sense of relief and unity pass through the city."

There was hysteria nowhere, though a few overzealous merchants hoped to cash in on any they could stir up. "War is not around the corner, it's here!" shrilled Dallas' Alexander Motor Co. "What will you do? Play safe or be caught with an old car?" Even without such a shock treatment, there were people who, remembering World War II shortages, rushed to get on new car waiting lists. Tire sales zoomed, but there was little evidence that housewives were stocking up on groceries.

Among males with slightly bulging waistlines, the standard topic was whether "the old uniform" would still fit. In San Francisco, where the road show of South Pacific was being advertised, people asked when they could get "two tickets on the aisle to 'South Korea.' " Recruiting offices there, as elsewhere, were bombarded with anxious teen-age pleas for advice. They weren't rushing to sign up; they just wanted to know where they stood.

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